MYSTIC RIVER: WHERE CLINT EASTWOOD ENDS
A Journey to the Birthplace of a Legend of American Cinema
Clint Eastwood, a few days after his last birthday (San Francisco, May 31, 1930, 5:35 PM), officially announced his retirement from work, at the fantastic age of 96!
I—like many, I believe—owe him a great deal. Like (perhaps) the best of world literature of all time, cinema, even before art in general and photography, has given me extraordinary input to process and reprocess.
In fact, I rewatch my all-time favorite films several times, almost every year: Umberto D., Bread and Chocolate, The Godfather I and II, Wild Strawberries, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Schindler’s List, Amarcord, and many others.
In recent years, I’ve tried to enjoy them in a different way: I turn off the sound, partly because I remember the lines by heart, and by not letting it distract me, I better appreciate the camera movements, the lenses chosen for each scene, the depth of field, the play of light and shadow…
Naturally, my personal list of the hundred best films in the history of cinema also includes his most shared masterpieces, and for me, the absolute top one is Mystic River (2003).
I think this film embodies a bit of his own personality, especially his roots, which are a predominantly Irish and Scottish mix, but also English and Dutch.
Even those with very little knowledge of cinema can distinguish the stigma of a film set in Boston from others that carry with them the humus of Hollywood (Steven Spielberg), New York (Stanley Kubrick), or the Middle West (the Coen brothers), regardless of their respective ethnic and cultural roots.
The Mystic River is truly, perhaps, the watershed that clearly separates a Boston of police officers from another Boston of commercial or criminal ties.
And the entire film could be a metaphor, a grand metaphor, of what the kids born there can become (the story is set in the 1960s), but also of what the director could have become had he not chosen to be a “sheriff”—in his own way—in so many successful films.
Being a sheriff, in fiction as in real life, would have fit him like a tailor-made suit, given that Mars in Aries and in the sixth house, but also on the fifth cusp, which, precisely, speaks to us of an “armed” job.
However, for a child born during the Great Depression and raised in the difficult years that followed, it would have been easy to fall to the other side of the barricade and become a man with a gun or a knife, but aligned with the opposite side (again, Mars in the sixth house).
This is especially true considering his nearly two-meter height (193 centimeters).
In that film, Eastwood almost leads us by the hand to see and feel the moods perceptible near that river that is a totem for the city, a watershed of a Boston that has given so many good citizens to the United States of America, and even a family of “presidents” who remain a legend to this day. But where a native sentiment is also deeply rooted, especially of Irish and Scottish origin.
This is perhaps my favorite Clint Eastwood feature film, also because in it I felt he was most candid, most sincere, most absolutely consistent with his Mars in Aries trine to dominant Neptune on the Midheaven: the altered states of consciousness, the uncompromising contrast between good and evil, without buffers of any kind.
And it’s also worth remembering that the bad guys in Mystic River are also “the righteous” and that the good guys are also “the bad guys,” always close to those waters where—I believe even today—many unspeakable secrets of the Suffolk County seat are buried.
A couple more observations on this living legend of American cinema.
Mars and Uranus in the fifth house tell us about his personal Magnum 44, which he fired many times and hit the mark: the actor-director-author fathered eight children with six different partners and—I believe—that, had he been born a woman and with the same sky, he would have had to have his tubes tied.
Finally, it’s very interesting, at least for me, to think about his relationship with money: with Mercury in Taurus and Venus, Jupiter, and Pluto in the eighth house, not only can we say that he had a strategic vision of the verb “getting rich,” but we can also affirm that this very important chapter of his life was approached according to a profoundly Scorpio logic, leaving nothing to chance.
It is estimated that he currently has a net worth exceeding four hundred million dollars, which is not a coincidence, but rather because, immediately after the success of Sergio Leone’s first spaghetti western films, he purchased a small Californian film company, Malpaso Productions, and immediately decided to share in the profits of his creations rather than demand very high fees for each film he starred in.
So how do we explain the terrible Saturn in the second house?
With considerable stinginess, as several biographies dedicated to the character inform us.
He tends to greatly reduce the number of takes when shooting and often settles for the first take, almost obsessively avoiding going over budget.
In any case, money or no money, many children and several (very expensive) divorce lawsuits, I am deeply grateful to him because he has given me extraordinary and unforgettable films.
